Boko Haram has killed 2,000, says Amnesty

YOLA (NIGERIA): Hundreds of bodies too many to count remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International on Friday suggested is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.

District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents on January 3 drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents. The insurgents also seized a key military base at Baga, which is on the border with Chad. A security official said the soldiers fought for hours but fled when no reinforcements arrived and they ran out of ammunition.

“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defense group that fights Boko Haram, said. He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.

An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.

If true, “this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram’s ongoing onslaught,” said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.

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The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a March 14, 2014, attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day. The 5-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.

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